Oh the humanity..... 

No great loss. When you have Platinum, Gold, Silver, and business-class passengers with priority, sometimes the queue can be shorter at the regular check-in. Sooner or later VA had to cull this down to differentiate the service levels. 

Clearly bringing the romance back into flying.

Suddenly the QAN self-check looks a whole lot more appealing.

And the chipping away begins..............

Yep... All the noise they made about how much better they are than Qantas... and now they start to erode away the things that made them different. No surprise though... and they will do all this stuff quietly.

Interesting to see how quickly Virgin forget the volume of business FF's who came across from QANTAS as a protest. It won't take much program tweaking to annoy FF's enough into returning. Personally I find the flight operations at Virgin excellent, but the ground operation appalling. The silver priority check-in was the only redeeming factor.

I think the timing of this is telling. The status-matched Golds who have (despite an unprecedented number of status-earning opportunities) not retained Gold are all falling to Silver right about now. So hands up if you're really surprised that Silver benefits are falling under the airline's microscope...

It comes in handy when the general line is 100m long and that seems to happen on certain flights, especially out of Perth. I am only silver level, just haven't quite got over the 500 credit hump, but this is the one benefit I value.....Looks like its back to Qantas for me, well all least there's no longer a reason to preclude them and look to VA first.